Washington
Post a "Useful Tool" for NATO?

Paper's
coverage distorts facts about Kosovo war crimes charges

January 28, 2000

When a group of prominent international legal scholars
filed a war crimes complaint against NATO for its actions
in Yugoslavia, the Washington Post's coverage
(1/20/00) was dismissivedemonstrating a poor grasp
of international law and the war in Yugoslavia, and
relying on an "expert" with a blatant and
unmentioned conflict of interest.

The scholars, led by Professor Michael Mandel of York
University in Toronto, sent a detailed legal brief to the
U.N.-sponsored International Criminal Tribunal for the
former Yugoslavia (ICTY), arguing that NATO leaders
committed serious violations of international law during
the 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia last year.

The Post article, by Paris correspondent
Charles Trueheart, curtly dismissed the legal case
against NATO: "Most legal scholars say the
professors have a pretty weak case, noting that
accidental civilian deaths caused by NATO bombs fail to
meet the commonly accepted standard for war crimes. Even
so, the legal campaign against the Western alliance has
taken on a life of its own." The piece goes on to
claim that "even the Tribunal's most ardent
champions in the human rights community and elsewhere are
worried that the case may have damaged its reputation
through an exercise in dangerous relativism."

Yet only one such "legal scholar" or member
of the "human rights community" is quoted by
Trueheart: Professor Paul Williams of American
University, who is identified simply as a "war
crimes expert." Nowhere in the article is it
disclosed that Williams, a former State Department
lawyer, is currently a paid lobbyist for the
"provisional government of Kosovo" in
Washington.

There's no evidence in Trueheart's article that he
made a genuine effort to determine whether, in fact,
other jurists or human rights experts support Mandel's
view that NATO violated international law during its
Kosovo campaign. Trueheart could have examined Human
Rights Watch's recent announcement that that it will send
detailed reports to the Tribunal arguing that NATO's
target selections were "disproportionate and should
be found violations of international humanitarian
law." (London Guardian, 1/7/00)

Trueheart might also have noted that no less a
"champion" of the Tribunal than its former
President and presiding judge, Antonio Cassese, has
expressed the view (European Journal of International
Law, #1/99) that NATO violated the United Nations
Charter by attacking Yugoslavia without a mandate from
the U.N. Security Council: "The breach of the United
Nations Charter occurring in this instance cannot be
termed minor. The action of NATO countries radically
departs from the Charter system for collective
security." (Cassese did add that in his view a moral
case could be made for NATO's intervention.)

In fact, judging by Trueheart's
assertions--"accidental civilian deaths caused by
NATO bombs fail to meet the commonly accepted standard
for war crimes"--he appears to be ignorant of either
the nature of NATO's attacks on Yugoslavia or of the
Geneva Convention statutes which make up the
"commonly accepted standard for war crimes."
This unfamiliarity is disturbing, since Trueheart
regularly covers the ICTY for the Post.

The Geneva Conventions would not hold a bomber
pilot criminally liable if a missile aimed at a military
installation--say, an anti-aircraft gun or a munitions
storage facility--drifted off-course and accidentally
struck a village populated by civilians. Such accidents
are not war crimes. In their complaint, Mandel and his
colleagues do not cite such accidents as violations of
the Geneva statutes. They point to other strikes that
were deliberate attacks on civilian targets.

Ironically, some of the clearest evidence that some
NATO strikes seriously breached the Geneva Conventions
can be found in the Washington Post's own
reporting. For example, a front-page article last year by
military reporter Dana Priest ("Bombing by
Committee: France Balked at NATO Targets," 9/20/99)
recounted the decision-making processes behind several
NATO targeting decisions. According to Priest, at one
point, British "Foreign Secretary Robin Cook
questioned strikes on power lines affecting a large
hospital in Belgrade. But the group brought him
around."

In another episode, shortly before a planned missile
strike on the headquarters of Milosevic's ruling
Socialist Party--which was located in a residential
neighborhood of Belgrade--an internal memo assessing the
likely civilian destruction was distributed among NATO
leaders:

In short, NATO anticipated that
the attack could, in the worst case, kill up to
350 people, including 250 civilians living in
nearby apartment buildings.

Washington and London approved the target, but
the French were reluctant, noting that the party
headquarters also housed Yugoslav television and
radio studios. "In some societies, the idea
of killing journalistswell, we were very
nervous about that," said a French
diplomat."

Ultimately, Paris went along. But in going ahead with
the attack, NATO appears to have directly breached
Article 51 of the Geneva Convention (Protocol I), which
prohibits any

attack which may be expected to cause incidental
loss of civilian life, injury to civilians,
damage to civilian objects, or a combination
thereof, which would be excessive in relation to
the concrete and direct military advantage
anticipated.

The Socialist Party building was itself a civilian
facility located hundreds of miles from the site of any
military conflict. Asked by a reporter at the next day's
press briefing what military rationale lay behind the
party headquarters strike, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea
could not name any specific military function.
Instead, he declared that NATO considered "any
aspect of the power structure" in Yugoslavia to be a
legitimate target, adding that the party headquarters
building "contains the propaganda machinery of
the ruling Socialist Party."

The reluctance expressed by British and French
diplomats over these strikes apparently stemmed from
their concern that the raids in question might represent
violations of the Geneva Conventionsor at least
that they would be perceived as such. In fact, NATO
leaders repeatedly admitted that their strategy in
attacking civilian targets was to terrorize the
population in the hope that the Serbian public would turn
against its government and pressure Milosevic to
capitulate. In a May 24 interview with the Washington
Post, U.S. Air Force Lt.-Gen. Michael Short explained
the strategy:

"If you wake up in the morning and you have
no power to your house and no gas to your stove
and the bridge you take to work is down and will
be lying in the Danube for the next 20 years, I
think you begin to ask, 'Hey, Slobo, what's this
all about? How much more of this do we have to
withstand?' And at some point, you make the
transition from applauding Serb machismo against
the world to thinking what your country is going
to look like if this continues."

Short's rather bowlderized list of examples of
civilian destruction in Serbia does not fully explain the
strategy: As the memorandum published by the Post showed,
NATO expected its attack on Socialist Party headquarters
to kill up to 250 neighboring residents as they slept.

In an another instance, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea
declared : "If President Milosevic really wants all
of his population to have water and electricity, all he
has to do is accept NATO's five conditions and we will
stop this campaign." Statements like these have led
Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth to
declare (Letters, London Guardian, 1/12/00) his
group's concern that

NATO bombed the civilian infrastructure not
because it was making a significant contribution
to the Yugoslav military effort but because its
destruction would squeeze Serb civilians to put
pressure on Milosevic to withdraw from Kosovo.
Using military force in this fashion against
civilians would violate the "principle of
distinction"a fundamental principle of
international humanitarian lawwhich
requires military force to be used only against
military targets, not against civilians or
civilian objects.

But if Trueheart and the Post appear
uninterested in examining whether NATO violated
international law during its Kosovo campaign, that does
not mean they are uninterested in the subject of war
crimes. In fact, the Post considers the Tribunal's
activities to be major news when they are directed
against NATO's enemies.

When the Tribunal handed down its indictment of
Slobodan Milosevic last May, Trueheart's article ran on
the front page. Since then, the Post has used the
phrase "indicted war criminal" to describe
Milosevic an average of about once a month. Yet the Post
has made no serious attempt to evaluate whether our
own government violated the laws of war in its air
campaign last year.

When the Tribunal was first established, American
policymakers hoped that just such a double standard would
prevail in media coverage. As Michael Scharf, the State
Department envoy who dealt with the Tribunal when it was
created, wrote in the Washington Post (10/3/99) :

America's chief Balkans negotiator at the time,
Richard Holbrooke, has acknowledged that the
tribunal was widely perceived within the
government as little more than a public relations
device and as a potentially useful policy
tool.... Indictments also would serve to isolate
offending leaders diplomatically, strengthen the
hand of their domestic rivals and fortify the
international political will to employ economic
sanctions or use force . Indeed [the
Milosevic indictment] became a useful tool in
their [U.S. and Britain's] efforts to demonize
the Serbian leader and maintain public support
for NATO's bombing campaign.

It's bad enough that the international war crimes
tribunalmuch of whose funding comes directly from
the U.S., in violation of the tribunal's own statutes (New
York Press, 1/26/00)can be described as a
"useful tool" of Washington's foreign policy.
The Washington Post should not serve the same
function.

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